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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Scientism...the reversed order of understanding science and God.

Blogger has issues. Some commenters have said their comments disappear. Then I had two days worth of comments supposedly forwarded to my email not coming in? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Hey, I do this for free and they do not charge me so there is no money changing hands but doggone it, Blogger, you do put advertising up and all that junk so FIGURE IT OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

According to the readership records, many one-time readers pass by but there is a group of part-time readers (just as I go by other blogs from time to time) and a few who cannot resist reading the blog even though they probably are close to the opposite opinion in most areas of discussion. Just so the regulars know, I have a meeting on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays in addition to work plus being part of a couple of organizations plus church so I have a pretty busy life. So there are days that I do not post, days I copy and present stuff from other folks and days that I pretty much write it all myself.

I have not yet read the most recent comments due to the Blogger (or possibly my ISP) malfunction but it is notable that many have poked fun at Bill Cooper's After The Flood but actually he is neither the first nor the last to find genealogical records and sync them up with the Biblical Table of Nations and the Bible genealogies. More on that later.

The Promise is soon to come, and one of the points that I will promise to cover is Scientism. If you do not know what that is, it is mentioned and defined in this article that is interesting in other ways as well, so here you go:

This week we feature an enquiry about feeding carnivores on the Ark, from LH of Victoria, Australia, to which Andrew Lamb responds, and an accusation of ‘closet scientism’ from a long-standing critic of CMI who apparently loves seeing his name in print on our site, Richard Meiss of Indiana, USA, to which Jonathan Sarfati responds.

Feeding carnivores on the Ark

How did Noah feed the carnivorous animals on the ark?
Thanks
L

Many carnivores, including lions and tigers, can readily manage on a vegetarian diet, and this may have happened on the Ark. See Teeth and Tucker for several modern cases of ‘herbivorous carnivores’. Dogs are considered carnivores, but dogs in some countries actually survive on a primarily vegetarian diet. During many years of working in Thailand, I observed that most pet dogs were fed on table scraps, which meant cooked rice was their staple food, as this was the staple food of their owners. And in Indonesia many dogs are fed mainly on vegetables—see note 5 here. Consider another carnivore, the snake. There is a widespread misconception that snakes can only eat live food, but there are commercial breeders today whose snakes thrive on dry food pellets. So there is no problem with Noah possibly doing the same for carnivores on the Ark—a mixture of grains and legumes would provide all the nutrition needed, including the building blocks for animal protein.

Some ‘carnivores’ actually survive on a primarily vegetarian diet.

If it was unavoidably necessary for some of the Ark’s tenants to have meat in their diet, this could have been readily accomplished using salted meat, reconstituted dried meat, or fresh meat from fodder animals carried aboard for this purpose. Tortoises are a good example of a fodder animal. Tortoises can survive up to a year and a half in captivity without water or food. In olden days, the famous Galápagos tortoise nearly went extinct due in part to its popularity as a fodder food. Thousands were taken aboard sailing ships to be kept as a source of fresh meat.

For a thorough study of this whole issue, see chapter 12, ‘Feeding challenges I: Animals that eat fresh or live food’ of Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study by John Woodmorappe. He deals exhaustively with the issue of what was eaten during and immediately after the Flood by animals that are now carnivores.

A related issue to this is the question of when animal carnivory began. There are a number of clues in the Bible hinting that carnivory may have been taking place before the Flood:

In Genesis 6:12 the phrase ‘all flesh’ is used. ‘And God looked upon the earth. And, behold, it was corrupted! For all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth.’ The Hebrew word translated as ‘all flesh’ generally means both people and animals. If the animal kingdom had been corrupted, carnivory might be an expected result. This phrase ‘all flesh’ occurs 10 times in the account of Noah and the Flood (Genesis chapters 6 to 9). In many of these occurrences it is plain that the phrase means animals and people inclusive.

Genesis 6:13 says the world was full of violence through them, where ‘them’ refers to ‘all flesh’ i.e. man and animals. This verse seems to indicate that animals were being violent too.

Another clue is in Genesis 6:7 where God expresses regret not only for having made mankind but for having made the beasts too. Perhaps carnivory by animals could have been a reason why God regretted having made them.

Another hint of post-Fall, pre-Flood carnivory is in the Curse as recorded in Genesis 3:14–19. In verse 14 it says ‘you [the serpent] are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every animal of the field.’ If the cattle and animals of the field hadn’t been cursed, then it would be incorrect to say the serpent was cursed more than them. The words ‘more than’ indicate that the animals were cursed too. If the animals were cursed, then might not carnivory be one result?

The scientific evidence supports this view that carnivory began before the Flood. Many fossils give indications of carnivory:

Crushed bones have been found in a fossilized dinosaur coprolite (dropping)—see T. rex drops clue.

Teeth marks have been found in dinosaur bones, in patterns suggestive of either carnivory or scavenging.

Such physical evidences strongly suggest that by the time of the Flood many animals had descended into carnivory.

We think it quite probable that not only some animals but some people too were eating meat before the Flood. There is the case of Jabal, of the wicked line of Cain, keeping livestock. See the discussion of his case under Did domestication take place pre-Flood or post-Flood? Although God did not give permission to eat meat until after the Flood (Genesis 9:3), the wickedness of man was great (Genesis 6:5) and the world was full of violence (Genesis 6:13); men were apparently breaking the full gamut of God’s commands and prohibitions. There is no reason to think they would have baulked at transgressing God’s stipulation that plants were to be man’s food.

Returning again to the carnivores on the Ark, another point to consider is that it was probably far easier in the pre-Flood world for animals to meet their nutritional requirements from plants alone. Due to ongoing genetic deterioration, both the digestive efficiency of animals and the nutritional value of plants are probably lower today than they were at the time of the Flood. So if carnivores today can survive many months with no or little meat, how much more so their more robust predecessors of Noah’s day.

Refuting an accusation of ‘closet scientism’

Image wikipedia.org

CK-Chesterton

Dear CMI–

Your article about Chesterton prompts me to make two comments. First of all, Chesterton’s arguments were made in the context of our biological knowledge of eighty years ago. Much has changed then, even though your article implies that there has been negligible scientific progress in the area.

The point was that Chesterton successfully took on the best arguments of his day. After all, these were advanced just as dogmatically, and worse, many churchian leaders urged Christians to accept evolution on the basis of such arguments. Yet even the late Derek Ager, a staunch anti-creationist, admitted:

‘It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student, from Trueman’s Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers’ Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been “debunked”. Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.’1

Another point is that many of the fallacies that Chesterton refuted are still invoked by evolutionists today, so clearly they haven’t learned from history.

Do you understand what this means? It means the virtual worship of science as the final and indeed only source of truth. As such, it is self-refuting, since the proposition ‘science is the final arbiter of all truth claims’ itself can’t be proved scientifically.

CMI, AiG, ICR, and your many fellow travelers, spend large amounts of time and money trying to put a scientific ‘gloss’ on creationism—as witness the RATE project, for example.

This sounds like ‘closet scientism’ to me. It is at the very least a tacit admission of the power of science and your willingness to borrow its luster.

All the above confuses the ministerial v magisterial approach to science. Scientism is an example of the magisterial use of science, where it stands over Scripture like a magistrate and judges it. Such ‘science’ is bound to be flawed, because science by its very nature is tentative, and starts with axioms invented by fallible humans and not revealed by the infallible God. Science should never be elevated to the same level as logic, because valid logical deductions from true premises always lead to true conclusions, while scientific theories come and go. This characteristic of science especially applies to origin science (the study of one-off origins in the past), and some apply this even to operational science (the science of repeatable observations in the present2), although it’s not our main point of debate.

The ministerial use of science occurs when science submits to Scripture. This means that all things necessary for our faith and life are either expressly set down in Scripture or may be deduced by good and necessary consequence from Scripture. Many Scriptural passages show that Christians are not supposed to check in their brains at the church door, but to use their God-given minds in subjection to God’s Word.3
The following section from Refuting Compromise should explain further why we like RATE, and why it is diametrically opposed to scientism.

Ministerial and magisterial uses of science contrasted

The ministerial use elaborates on the clear teachings of the Bible, and may help us decide on equally plausible alternatives consistent with the language. Note that this approach to Scripture does not deny the authority of Scripture, but recognizes that while Scripture is ‘true truth’ it is not exhaustive truth. In contrast, the magisterial use overrules the clear teaching of the Bible to come up with a meaning inconsistent with sound hermeneutics. Instead of the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), this is Scriptura sub scientia (Scripture below science). The following examples can aid our understanding of the differences between the magisterial and ministerial use of science in the interpretation of the Bible:

Scripture teaches that a year-long global flood (with various stages) occurred about 1,600 years after creation. Creationist geologists, such as CMI’s Dr Tas Walker, have worked on building a scientific model, based on the types of rock formations predicted in every stage.4 A magisterial use of science is to claim that uniformitarian science disproves a global Flood, so that Genesis must be reinterpreted to mean a local Flood, or even dismissed as unhistorical.

The whole tenor of Scripture is that the individual is a human being right from the beginning of biological life; there is nothing to indicate that there is any secondary event of ‘ensoulment’ after the beginning of biological life. In particular, the Psalmist teaches that life begins at conception (Psalm 51:5), i.e., he explicitly states that it was ‘me’ that existed from conception, not some blob of cells that later became ‘me’. Science elaborates on this by showing that the union of sperm and egg (fertilization or conception) is the scientifically irrefutable beginning of the individual’s life, so can be equated with the Biblical term.

A magisterial use of reason is that of theistic evolutionists who claim that all living organisms, including man, have evolved from a simple cell. So if they regard Genesis as remotely historical at all, it must be ‘reinterpreted’ to be compatible with the idea that one kind has changed into another kind, quite contrary to the plain language of the biblical text.

Further reading

Recommended Resources

The Bible plainly teaches that the Flood of Noah’s day covered the entire globe. But this raises serious questions. How could Noah and his family have cared for all the animals? What did the carnivorous animals eat during and after the Flood? This excellent and in-depth book presents satisfying answers to many more such questions. (High School–Adult) 298 pages.

Rod Walsh felt called to build incredible scale models of Noah’s Ark to show people that Noah’s Flood was more than a fairy tale. Rod’s personal journey is also an inspiration as he and wife Nancy now tour the world with these breathtaking models. (Junior High–Adult) 30 min Not available until late 2008You may still order it now and delivery will occur as soon as possible (free delivery of Rod’s Ark if ordered now with other products).

References

Ager, D.V., The nature of the fossil record, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 87(2):131–160, 1976.

36 comments:

"Many carnivores, including lions and tigers, can readily manage on a vegetarian diet..."

[sigh] And another creationist crashes and burns, courtesy of a claim he should have checked, but didn't.

In fact, the felids are the only obligate carnivores among the Mammalia. Like all other mammals they require an organic molecule called "taurine," but unlike all other mammals they can't synthesize it from simpler materials. They have to get it from their food, and taurine occurs only in animal flesh.

This pattern of genetic defects within certain groups of organisms, incidentally, is yet another item of evidence that indicates evolutionary theory is correct. Felids and taurine are only one example, and not even the best known.

Won't work. Readers, the claims of the above commenters are lies. Carnivores of all kinds have been proven to be able to subsist on non-carnivorous diets. They tend to have a set of pat answers to creationist claims that they have compiled, many of them on the talkorigins site. In fact, I think talkorigins is designed to be a set of answers for Darwinists to use and we probably get commenters from the site because I have called them out on specific lies they refuse to withdraw or admit to. So suckers and talkorigins go hand in hand.

Creation.com is anathema to Darwinists because several top scientist like Jon Sarfati are part of the team and Sarfati would slice and dice Richard Dawkins in a debate like a Slap-Chop. I stand by the information in this post and flatly refute the comments above. Lies.

In fact a quick perusal of the post mentions some long-refuted claims that Darwinists continue to allow to be propagated. It may be an old complaint but there are still schools and museums presenting Miller-Urey, Haeckel and Peppered Moths as evidence for Darwinism. If you do not believe in an active God who will be an ultimate judge, then you have no reason not to lie if it advances your worldview/religion.

Part of my plan this year is to present the Christian worldview, the other common prevailing worldviews, the historical evidence for the Bible as the most reliable source of the history of early man and the debilitating effects of Darwinist/Socialist propaganda and groupthink in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Darwinism is the enemy of logic and reason. Animal Farm. 1984. Brave New World. Atlas Shrugs. The rise of Statism goes hand in hand with Atheism and evolution. Even an Atheist like Ayn Rand saw the evils of Statism. Aldous Huxley was a staunch Darwinist and yet wrote a book that predicted the doom of humanity should his own belief system take hold. How could they not see? These are also questions I will take on.

Did you not get the part where I wondered at the logic of Orwell, Huxley and Rand? They wrote books that actually eroded their own positions, in my opinion. Socialism always leads to Statism. Individualism cannot be sustained in a Socialist state, but requires a commitment to God-given individual rights.

As to Jon Woolf, enjoy, your comments are getting shrill. Since cats have been demonstrated to be able to be sustained by non-flesh foodstuffs, all of your claims are invalid. You can give me a stack of books claiming that man can never fly and I can look overhead and see yet another jet beginning a descent pattern.

Meanwhile, you are once again focusing on an incidental part of a much larger thought, as the larger thought is too much to take on?

Taurine, which is not technically an amino acid, is abundant in seaweed, meat and animal source foods, excluding milk products and also bacteria. Most plant and bacterial sources NOW in existence have low levels of Taurine but certainly a cat could get enough Taurine from the right seaweeds, fungi and bacteria. So the statement that "taurine only comes from animal flesh" is just wrong.

"Since cats have been demonstrated to be able to be sustained by non-flesh foodstuffs,"

When, where, how, and by whom?

"So the statement that "taurine only comes from animal flesh" is just wrong."

Very good, Radar. You've demonstrated that, given sufficient incentive, you can research an issue and produce useful results.

Now, do you think you can do it again, and tell us why, even though taurine occurs in low amounts in all those sources you listed, all of modern veterinary science still agrees that cats must have the animal-flesh form of taurine, and no other source will do for them?

"Creation.com is anathema to Darwinists because several top scientist like Jon Sarfati are part of the team and Sarfati would slice and dice Richard Dawkins in a debate like a Slap-Chop. I stand by the information in this post and flatly refute the comments above. Lies."

It's a pity then that Sarfati himself sullies his reputation by posting lies, as has been pointed out to you previously. Creation.com is also full of lies, which has also been pointed out to you. Hypocrite much?

BTW, to refute the comments above, you'll have to do more than just say "I refute them". You'll have to present opposing evidence. Which you don't have. Which is why you just call them lies and run off, whistling past the graveyard all the way.

You and your fellow YECs have lost the central arguments for your position years ago. You just haven't realized it yet.

If eight people tried to build a working copy of the Ark (even with no dinosaurs on board), then they'd wind up in jail for cruelty to animals. The only way the Ark could work is through a continuous process of Divine Intervention. You know this, I know this, Sarfati knows this, and there's no sense in pretending anything else.

So the only possible answer to, "What did carnivores eat on the Ark?" is: "We don't know. Maybe they were in cryogenic suspension capsules. Maybe God shrunk them down and put them into terrariums and gave Noah a tube of manna flakes to feed them with. Maybe the story had gotten distorted by the time it got down to Moses, and he didn't realize that Noah was only responsible for animals living in his immediate area (and Deucalion picked up the animals living near Mount Olympus, and so on.)"

Now, why can't Sarfati just say that, instead of all this pathetic handwaving about how some carnivores can live on vegetarian diets?

I'm going to suggest that Sarfati has indeed fallen into the heresy of Scientism; the belief that miracles aren't commonplace and that most natural events have natural causes. If he's not careful, he'll come up with one natural cause too many and find himself saying, "Grandparents have been observed to exaggerate when they tell stories to their grandchildren. The Ark is probably a fanciful detail that got added to a story about a devastating local flood."

So he's traveling down a dangerous road. I'm wondering if it might be safer if he spent less time thinking about the "Ark" parts of his faith, and more time thinking about the "feeding the hungry and comforting the oppressed" parts.

Chaos, you have not been a regular reader or you would know that Sarfati was answering a question specific to cats. COULD they have subsisted on vegetation for a year's time? Yes, especially as the food available pre-Flood would very likely be different than what has devolved and very likely cat-types were even able to ingest food without taurine pre-Flood.

There is every likelihood that juvenile animal were sent to the Ark so that space would be no problem but the Ark was so massive and the requirements for types of organisms (land-dwelling vertebrates and birds) that there is no space issue or food issue.

God may well have caused the animals to hibernate. The Bible does not specify. John Woodmrappe's book on the subject goes into great detail on this matter and if you have not read it your comments seem a bit silly. You are making arguments from ignorance as you do not comprehend the subject well.

The Flood is a miraculous event in that God caused it. How much of the cause was by purely natural means is unknown. Rapid plate subduction, once begun, would likely go a the rate of a freight train for a time, as I have posted previously. But only the Flood could have left the sedimentary rock layers we see today. Logic is left behind when Darwinists confront either the makeup of organisms or the nature of the rock layers.

I make scientific statements, you make snide remarks. Sounds to me like you have nothing to say that includes evidence.

Thus far you have made a falsified claim concerning the diet of cats. You have shown a remarkable lack of knowledge of the dimensions and capacity of the Ark and the cargo thereof. You have done some whistling past the graveyard. I think that about covers the Darwinist side.

"I make scientific statements, you make snide remarks. Sounds to me like you have nothing to say that includes evidence."

Au contraire. Jon made a scientific statement:

"In fact, the felids are the only obligate carnivores among the Mammalia. Like all other mammals they require an organic molecule called "taurine," but unlike all other mammals they can't synthesize it from simpler materials. They have to get it from their food, and taurine occurs only in animal flesh.

This pattern of genetic defects within certain groups of organisms, incidentally, is yet another item of evidence that indicates evolutionary theory is correct. Felids and taurine are only one example, and not even the best known."

You came back with the snide remark:

"Carnivores of all kinds have been proven to be able to subsist on non-carnivorous diets. They tend to have a set of pat answers to creationist claims that they have compiled, many of them on the talkorigins site. In fact, I think talkorigins is designed to be a set of answers for Darwinists to use and we probably get commenters from the site because I have called them out on specific lies they refuse to withdraw or admit to. So suckers and talkorigins go hand in hand.

Creation.com is anathema to Darwinists because several top scientist like Jon Sarfati are part of the team and Sarfati would slice and dice Richard Dawkins in a debate like a Slap-Chop. I stand by the information in this post and flatly refute the comments above. Lies."

Jon asked you to back up your claim that "cats have been demonstrated to be able to be sustained by non-flesh foodstuffs"...

"Creation.com is anathema to Darwinists because several top scientist like Jon Sarfati are part of the team and Sarfati would slice and dice Richard Dawkins in a debate like a Slap-Chop."

You mean the lying Creation.com and the lying Jon Sarfati?

Maybe this Sarfati is a reputable and honorable guy. Who knows. But reputable, honorable people, on realizing they've published something that's not true, would offer a retraction and correction. We can certainly draw our conclusions based on the lack of that happening. Apparently you can't.

Same goes for Creation.com. You take digs at talkorigins for disagreeing with you on a single page for which you believe to have contradicting evidence. Creation.com is full of outright lies and equivocations.

As soon as you invoke magic or miracles, you're not doing science anymore.

So long, Radar. Thanks for playing. No prize for you today, but you do get some lovely parting gifts...

Thank you, Jon, this comment is a gift. Unlike the ridiculous fellow who is going on about creation.com (padded cell in that one's future, methinks) you do remain steady on. I needed just such a comment for my series, so you remain a valued contributor!

...and talkorigins is full of BS at every turn. Go read what they say about Haeckel, for instance. Propandists and proud of it. You goofs who try to compare talkorigins and creation.com probably think Dawkins would win a debate with Sarfati, too. Even Hugh Ross is afraid to debate Sarfati. Creation.com is committed to finding and publishing the truth. Talkorigins is committed to holding the Darwinist party line at all costs. My blog, my opinion, but it is an informed one.

By your standards, perhaps ... but then, you've shown many times just how flexibly self-serving your 'standards' are. It is to laugh, the guy who can't even offer a useful definition of 'information' sneering at others for 'bad science' and 'bad philosophy.'

And so much energy wasted in the process. A true and valued ally of the Lone Power you are, Radar.

I gave the dictionary definition of information, and that was too much for you guys. It wasn't anything snarky. It isn't your fault. No Darwinist has an answer, Jon, you are not the Lone Ranger. Only God is a logical source of information. Once you understand that naturalism is a religion and not a fact of science then you can wrap the mind around that. For existence, life and information the answer is either magic or miracle, because natural forces just are not going to cut it.

"I gave the dictionary definition of information, and that was too much for you guys."

No, not too much - not enough. You need a definition of information that permits the quantification of information. That's something you never found, and it is essential for your argument that information is lost or can not be increased.

You lost this argument a long time ago. You just haven't realized it yet. We're not holding our breath.

"I already posted the evidence for taurine in many seaweeds and bacteria and fungi."

You made a specific claim: "Since cats have been demonstrated to be able to be sustained by non-flesh foodstuffs, all of your claims are invalid."

And you've been asked several times to back this up. I suspect it's a lie. But perhaps it isn't. So please back it up. Or admit that you made it up. When, where, how and by whom was it demonstrated that cats can be sustained by non-flesh foodstuffs?

Besides, why are you even engaging in this argument? Whenever science indicates something you don't like, you can just invoke magic. That's the luxury of the "creation scientist", and why they are not actual scientists.

"Unlike the ridiculous fellow who is going on about creation.com (padded cell in that one's future, methinks) you do remain steady on."

Nice bit of projection there, Radar. You scoff at talkorigins' arguments without actually being able to address them. I've pointed out a specific lie and showed how Sarfati and creation.com spread that lie.

I've presented a solid argument. You haven't.

You can argue with arguments and accept it when the arguments don't go in your favor, or you can to back to having your pride take over and make claims that you can't back up. Readers of this blog already know which path you'll choose.

Look at the question again: "How did Noah feed the carnivorous animals on the ark?" Sarfati doesn't say that the animals didn't need to eat because God put them into a state of hibernation. He doesn't say that God created fresh food as needed. He says, "Many carnivores, including lions and tigers, can readily manage on a vegetarian diet, and this may have happened on the Ark. [...] If it was unavoidably necessary for some of the Ark’s tenants to have meat in their diet, this could have been readily accomplished using salted meat, reconstituted dried meat, or fresh meat from fodder animals"

Why is Sarfati so desperate to find a non-miraculous solution to the question?

Bonus question: Suppose there was a zoo that had exhibits of every species of land animal on Earth, and it didn't have any visitors. In the absence of miracles, what's the minimum number of full-time employees needed to keep the animals fed and healthy? (I don't know the answer, but you could probably get a rough estimate from the personnel department at your local zoo. I'm pretty sure it'll be more than eight.)

In the absence of miracles, what's the minimum number of full-time employees needed to keep the animals fed and healthy?

An interesting question. It would vary from group to group -- ie, snakes take rather less care than bears. My first-order wild-a$$ guess would be very roughly 1 person per family of animals -- where 'family' means the taxonomic group. That is, one person for the cats, one for the dogs, one for the bears, one for the weasels, etc. There are around 150 recognized families of mammals, ranging from shrews to elephants. There are about 50 families of reptiles, and more than 200 distinct families of birds.

Radar will no doubt argue that there were fewer actual animals on the Ark thanks to "kinds" and hyperfast post-Flood evolution, but even he can't get from there to a number low enough for eight people to handle the job. Not without causing mass outbreaks of ROFLitis in his readers, at least.

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour